Under The Hood (Jade Cocoon 2)
In this page, all data collected and understood over two years will be listed here, with more information being added in the near future. There will be information on the data of Divine Beasts, moves, abilities, and bosses, just to name a few aspects of the game. All data has been collected from the file SLUS_203.09, which can be copied straight from the CD-ROM. Move Data This section will explain in great detail the data of the moves in Jade Cocoon 2 and how they work. How a move actually works: Here, we will be looking at how the coding translates into a move in the game. For an example, let's take a look at Agniagna (A): The first three lines of every move consist of its name, which has a limit of 12 characters only, and the lines typically look like this in the game code: 005030C0 696E6741 005030C4 616E6761 005030C8 00000000 For Agniagna, as you can see, the third line of code is unused (nop command) as the move only has 8 characters within it. Also notice is that if you look at the move in a hex editor, the name is actually written in reverse hexadecimal, meaning that the game reads each line with hex numbers written in reverse, but allocates it to the correct spot after analyzing the move. After these three lines is two lines of filler data. The next three lines determine a few things, and this only applies to certain moves, for example, Mitrea (S): 005002D4 0000000A 005002D8 00000008 005002DC 0000000C The first lines of Mitrea that show real significance are these first three lines. The first line determines whether it's a Magic spell or a Skill, which calls either the Strength or Wisdom stat to come into play. The second line determines where the attack is being aimed; the 8 represents the user's whole BeastAmulet. The third line represents the "damage type", but in this case, since Mitrea isn't a damaging move, it doesn't apply here. However, with other moves like Soldote (S) and Water Barrier (S), the 3 in the last line listed above represents hitting the entire side of the enemy's BeastAmulet. The next four lines are repeated twice more; these are the effects in battle that a move has. Keeping Mitrea here as an example, here is the effect that Mitrea gets in the game's code: 005002E0 0000000E 005002E4 00000003 005002E8 000000FF 005002EC 00000032 The first line is the actual effect that is being applied to targets; here, it's Mitrea, the boosting of all stats. Genki probably coded Mitrea like this so they wouldn't have to fill the game with so much data in programming individual effects to raise attacking, defending, and speed stats to fill this one move. The second line is the duration of the effect, which in Mitrea's case is three turns (which includes the turn in which it was cast, so really you only get two turns with it before it wears off). The third line is the rate at which the effect will take place. In Mitrea's case, it will always take place upon casting, hence the "FF" value. When programming moves like Poison Storm (S) though, you need to be chanced at whether or not you'll be poisoned, hence Poison Storm's 50% chance to be poisoned upon contact. Anyway, the last line represents how much the effect will affect your beasts. In this case, Mitrea only raises all stats by 50%, hence the 32 value. But, for effective as Mitrea can be for in a pinch, this is a perfect value to raise all stats by, considering how over-powering any edits to Mitrea or any Beasts using Mitrea would be (like the Kalma beasts and Lilith's minions). As stated before, the effects are repeated twice more, for a grand total of up to three different effects that each move can have. After the three effects, there is filler data for 14 more lines, until we get to the final sections of the move data. For this example, let's go out with a bang, literally, and examine Lilith's signature move, Dark Impact (S). For Dark Impact, we all know it's a Spell that Lilith can cast, but most skill moves will have a line of code before the accuracy of the move that would look like this: 00506450 0000000A That would make Dark Impact a skill, and incredibly buggy at that. Anyway, back to the last lines of code; this section is going to be a little lengthy; 00506454 000000FF 00506458 0000001B 0050645C 00000001 00506460 00000050 00506464 00679CC0 00506468 00679CC0 0050646C 0000000B 00506470 00000000 00506474 00000005 00506478 00020003 0050647C 0000004D So to light the fuse, we first have the accuracy of the move. If it's a spell, it will ALWAYS be FF, unless Genki really wanted this to be more like Pokemon, than they could've introduced more accuracy values to every move. Digression aside, next we have the damage value that is input into an as-of-now not-yet-known damage formula, but the value translates into decimal as 27 from 1B. This may not seem like much, but when your monsters have high stats, it probably wouldn't even matter. Just look at Lilith for an example. The next line is a determination of magic against the enemy, signified by the 1 value. Skills would have something totally different. After that is the MP consumption, of which this move consumes 80 MP just to cast, which is a seriously high value for normal beasts, but not for Lilith, as she has over 5000 MP. After this would be a pointer to a move description; since this isn't a move you can readily receive in the game, Genki decided to leave this first line of the move description blank, as with Water Barrier, Larvalize, Seal, and all the dummied-out moves. More on those later. The second line, for every other move, is left blank for reasons not yet known. The next line after the description codes is where the attack s being aimed; if at the entire BeastAmulet, like Dark Impact, then it would be the B value. Magics aimed at individual beasts have the value of D (most of the time, and this also applies to skills as well). The next line is the call code to determine whether or not the monster uses its Skill or Magic animations, which branch off into their own scripts with camera angles included. The line after that determines the rank of the skill, which in this case a determination of how powerful the move could be. It runs through E Rank (value 0) to S Rank (value 5). The next line of code determines the element of the move being used (which, if we're being perfectly honest here, Dark Impact really should be classified as a neutral move, because it's powerful enough as it is). The final line of code determines what move animation to use. In this case, the value is 4D, which activates the Dark Impact attack animation and plays the sound that goes along with it. Move List in Hexadecimal This sub-section will list off every single move in the game according to its hexadecimal value, with all organized by element. Boss attacks and dummied-out moves have their own classifications below.